Dean Nelson is the Telegraph Media Group's South Asia editor. He has been based in New Delhi for four years. He is @DelhiDean on Twitter.

Can reserved seats in Parliament win equality for India's women?

India is set to pass a new law reserving one-third of parliamentary and state assembly seats for women in the hope of improving the prospects of its second sex.

I say second because those fairer creatures who suffer medieval living conditions in vast swathes of India were lucky to be born. According to Unicef, 50 million girls have disappeared from India, suspected to have been murdered at birth by ‘co-operative’ midwives or aborted following illegal sex determination tests.

Those women who are elected to these reserved seats will have my admiration and support, because they’ll need all the help they can get.

Like with so much else in India, what it says on the tin doesn’t always reflect the contents.

Women have had the vote in India since 1949, yet dowries still change hands, even among the educated classes, whose own women folk appear to be the greatest culprits of all when it comes to ‘female foeticide.’

‘Dowry murders’ remain regular features in the Indian press, where young brides who move into the groom’s family home are killed or tortured if their fathers do not meet the in-laws’ increasingly lavish demands: A new car or motorbike for example. To them a woman is a revenue source, to be dumped if the money stops flowing, or forced to have an abortion should she be set to deliver a female liability.

A wedding and dowry for a girl can cost more than £20,000 even for relatively poor families, and it is seen as a promotional event for a family’s status and connections, rather than a celebration of love. So until recently it was not uncommon to see advertisements for ‘sex-determination’ tests carrying the slogan: “Spend 600 Rupees now, save 50,000 later.”

I’d like to believe women playing a greater role in the nation’s politics will make a difference, but I do wonder whether it will do the good its supporters hope.

There is an excellent commentary in today’s Pioneer by Sidharth Mishra which describes a public debate where the chief executive of his municipal corporation was to discuss local issues with the female councillor for the area’s women-only seat. The councillor did not turn up, but was represented instead by her husband. His wife, it appeared, was merely his proxy in a seat he could not represent.

It is quite common for gangsters’ molls to stand on behalf of their disqualified husbands in India.

So we don’t know who will eventually occupy these new parliamentary seats and whether they will be speaking for India’s down-trodden women or for husbands and their dowry-focused families who really call the shots.

The change India needs cannot be brought by legislation in New Delhi (although it could be a start) but must be won by women themselves challenging their male relatives in what would probably be a bloody battle.

It would need those poor women working as domestic servants to refuse to hand over their hard-won wages to the idle drunks they were forced to marry. It would need middle-class women to stop hand-feeding their plump ‘little princes’ and give as much attention to their daughters.

It would also require Indians to stop referring to sexual assault and harassment as ‘Eve-teasing’, with its implication that it is all a bit of a giggle.

I remember soon after we moved to India having dinner with two well-educated middle-aged women who told me they still ate only after their brothers had had their fill when they went home to family meals.

It is a mark of where women are at in India today that only yesterday its chief justice felt the need to argue the case for a woman’s right to marry her rapist to restore her honour. Obviously, once raped she would no longer be a virgin, and therefore be unmarriageable. In this way the rapist is miraculously recast from villain to hero.

I think for women in much of ‘democratic’ India, social life is barely different from that in Pakistan, give or take the burqa.

I hope the Women’s Reservation Bill is passed tomorrow, and that it leads to the equality its supporters dream of. But I suspect hundreds of millions will die waiting.